Not Quite Yet
by Azaria Stromsis
Summary: Kensi Blye has officially died four times.


**Title: **Not Quite Yet **  
**

**Character(s):** Kensi Blye

**Summary: **Kensi Blye has officially died four times.

**Words:** 3,059

**Prequals: **Same universe as my other two one-shots, 'Anxiety' and 'Like a Light Switch'. Some back story is presented there, along with the basic back story of Vivienne Soledad. If you review, tell me if you like this approach to Kensi.

_Disclaimer: I do not own NCIS: Los Angeles. All characters presented here belong to Shane Brennan while I own the plot line. _

_Another one-shot in the same universe as my others and I just couldn't help myself. I had an idea for a Callen/Kensi one-shot or even a crossover with the original but then I realized that there just is not enough Kensi fics on this site. I decided to remedy that disturbing fact. Enjoy and please please please review! It kinda sorta makes my day.  
_

Not Quite Yet

Death has tried to claim Kensi Blye many times and in all instances it has failed.

Kensi Blye has officially died four times. Well, at least four times, possibly more, with countless other near-death experiences, too many to count really. Three of those four times, she had been Vivienne Soledad and the other time, the most recent and hopefully the last time for the foreseeable future, she had been herself.

The second time she died she was in Laos or Cambodia, where she was being held for five months as a hostage during a very tense negotiation period in which they (her captors) had absolutely no idea who the hell she was or where the hell she came from. Kensi took immense pleasure, more than she rightly should have, in keeping this information from her captors. They were bad men who hurt children and there were many things in the world that Kensi could handle and the slaughtering of children was not one of them. She had willingly took the job when it was offered (though she would be taking it anyway, it wasn't like she had a choice in the matter) and had withstood five months of agony and foreign languages shouted in her face, and even some that she was familiar with but she couldn't show any recognition because then they might have figured out that she was an American, and bamboo shoots in places where they should not have been.

That was about the time when she had figured out that she was in Asia. Until then she had no idea where she was, because she had originally been in Mexico City, then blacked out while being kidnapped, though the chloroform might have had some influence on her blacking out, and woken up in a damp cell with it pouring rain outside. She had one window, maybe a foot wide and a half of a foot tall, with bars and no glass. It was right above the spot where she was supposed to sleep and she woke up soaking wet most of the time, shivering. She had been sicker than a dog the entire time and she still didn't talk. The most she had gotten out of anyone was that she was there from May to October, pretty much the entirety of the monsoon season in Laos and Cambodia (she didn't know where she was being held because they moved her at times but the cell ended up being the same in all of the places that she went).

In all of those five months, where she was interrogated daily, and sometimes more, she did not talk once. She screamed, she laughed, she smirked in such a way that required them to kick her unconscious (a very reliable way to escape the pain of knowing that her job wasn't done quite yet and until it was done there would be no rescue team) but she did not speak.

She had been sent to kill a man who had yet to show his face. And until then she had taken the beatings with muffled grunts of pain. Eventually, her silence drew enough attention that the man in charge had made his appearance.

Kensi didn't know his name, even to this day. She hadn't wanted the name then and she didn't need the name now. She had only taken a few pieces of information with her on her assignment. She repeated the information to herself daily, while she was sitting in her jail cell gathering water from the rain pouring in through her window and while she was getting the hell beaten out of her.

_Hansa, _she would repeat while she drank her forth handful of freezing cold water, better than the tepid stuff that she was allowed to once every three days. _Lek and Lamai, _she would repeat to herself, grunting as she felt yet another rib fracture itself. _Yindee_, she would repeat to herself as men glanced lecherously at her but she just ignored them because this particular terrorist group did not endorse rape and neither did the superiors of her particular holding cell (thank God, it was perhaps the only thing that did not go wrong on that particular mission. She could quite proudly say she had never been raped, though she had certainly had to fight a few or more off, and she was one of the few female special ops officers who could say that).

_Erawan, Kavi, Boon-nam, Ramphonei, Durudee. _

Children's names. The names of his victims.

Those names kept her going through five months of sheer and utter torture, the definition of torture, and when the big man finally showed up, dismissing everyone from her rooms so he could 'talk' with her in private to finally dig the information out of her, she went into action. She surprised him, serenely getting up from her chair, where she had sat unrestrained since the second month, walking up to him, ripping the Bowie hunting knife from his grip and calmly slitting his throat.

She had been the model prisoner for five months, slowly getting enough freedom so that she would gain this particular moment and win.

Kensi had done her homework and done it well. She knew for a fact that he would only interrogate with himself and the victim in the room (something about daddy issues) and she knew for a fact that psychologically she would wear them done well before the boss would become curious and try and beat it out of her himself. She had it all planned out before she had even landed in Mexico City where she knew she would be kidnapped. She had it all planned out and it was then that she realized the need her father saw in making her play chess routinely.

After that, she had been drugged (after being beaten to within an inch of her life) and lifted into a car to be dumped into the middle of the jungle. Kensi guessed that they planned to slit her wrists and leave her to die.

It was in the transportation to the jungle that the rescue team arrived. Later, Kensi would find out that they had known her location for most of her captivity but they had strict orders to not retrieve her until her mission had been completed. They had somehow heard of the boss man's death (Chung, something Chung, and the fact that Kensi remembered his name, photographic memory, even to this day kind of made her want to throw up because he was a man who did not deserve to have anyone remember him). And they had rescued her before she had even made it to the jungle. Their transportation train had stopped at a way station for fuel or something and she had been thrown into a jail cell and that was where she was rescued. But not before someone had come in with a needle that was easily the largest she had ever seen and injected her with something before grinning and running off. It was then that Kensi had heard the screams and gunfire and the desperate cries of "Vivienne! V!"

The cavalry had arrived and breached the compound.

She didn't remember anything after that really, just two members coming in and seeing her. One of them, possibly one she knew, had nearly fainted at the sight of her and he had run over saying over and over again, "V, sweetie, what did they give you? What did they give you?"

She had, supposedly, replied, "Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world…"

"Shit," the man she possibly knew had said, "she's reciting Tennyson."

"She's in shock." The other had replied and then everything went black.

It sort of freaked her out that when dying she immediately retreated to her happy place and her happy place was reciting Tennyson. A psychologist would probably understand if that meant anything, but Kensi did not like psychologists.

Kensi had been injected with a lethal amount of horse tranquilizer and it was a miracle that she had been brought back to life. The man's death made international news and she had received a standing ovation when she had walked into her division's offices weeks later before promptly asking to be reassigned to Afghanistan and the war there. Because there were American soldiers dying out there, soldiers like her father, dead for a very long time even though it had only been about six or seven years, and she wanted to be reassigned.

She was denied.

Damn injuries and the United States government wanting their agents in perfectly working physical health (mental and emotional health was another thing entirely, but only a few were so traumatized that they needed to be pulled from active duty and Kensi was an amazing actress).

The third time she died was not as interesting as the second or even the first or forth times. She was just in the desert after being dropped into the middle of Afghanistan. And, while she would wake up to find herself in the hands of exactly who's hands she wanted to be in for the next two months, Kensi actually died being taken. Looking back, Kensi kicked herself every time because she went down just a little too late even though she felt the changing of pressure that indicated a bomb was being dropped. She had two pieces of shrapnel in her chest. The only reason she lived was because the people that captured her knew who she was and what she was worth. And, they also had a world class surgeon and operating room available to fix her broken and bleeding body. Out of all the places that Kensi has been held hostage (numerous) she prefers to think about Afghanistan the most because they were actually semi-kind to her (mainly because they were freaking teenagers who were well away from their superiors who would not have been so kind).

After Afghanistan she was rescued by Jack (after accomplishing her mission of course) and laid low for the next couple of years, through leaving Jack and joining NCIS and eventually getting stabbed while on the job, her fourth death.

It was one of the missions right before Dom came and made their trio a quartet and she had gone down with numerous stab wounds in her chest and abdomen. It certainly wasn't the most painful of deaths (Cambodia or Laos or wherever the hell she had been five years earlier was by far the most painful death) but it was the most sudden and the most daunting as she passed out with Callen's and Sam's horror stricken gaze upon her prone form. She remembers yelling and sirens and then nothing until she woke up the white, sterilized hospital with all of those being machines.

Kensi had flat lined three times on the way to the hospital (she woke up with a broken right thumb and a broken pinkie because Sam and Callen had been squeezing her hands so hard and she didn't even want to know how the hell they had both bullied their way into the ambulance) and twice more at the hospital before she had finally stabilized enough for a twelve-hour surgery to be performed. Kensi, normally wanting to know everything that happened to her body, had left the topic of her injuries alone after waking up and seeing Callen's dark look. Callen had kept her close when she had come back, and Kensi couldn't help but admit that, while working solo was preferable, working with a competent partner was nice.

Even thought the fourth time she had died she had technically died five times she just rolled it all into one because she didn't remember time between the 'deaths'.

But, by far, the most jarring of all of the Kensi Blye's deaths was the time in Columbia, her first death. That was the death that she blocked from her mind because she shouldn't have died in the first place. She should have held on just a little bit longer, but, after a nine months of solitary confinement with the only human interaction being torture, Kensi has basically gone insane. She still didn't understand how prisoners could go years in solitary confinement because it quite frankly sucked. Kensi thinks that the first time she died was just to escape the loneliness.

In all actualities, it was an accident. She just sort of slipped into death, sliding down the hill of pain and fire and heat into the cool pain of nothing at the very bottom. For months she had been holding on for dear life but that day she was just so tired and lonely that she just let go.

She had been there for nine months and fourteen days out of what would eventually turn out to be almost a year and she would later find out that the bastards taped her the entire time (she guarded those tapes with her life) and she had just sort of slipped over the line, slipping into death. After a year in solitary confinement she almost didn't realize that she was dead.

She remembered waking up and there was nothing but blackness around her, with just a tiny pinprick of light far above her head with no way of getting to it. Kensi (Vivienne at this time) had felt a very strong urge to go towards this light but then Kensi realized that she was at peace, peace that was pressing itself down upon her chest oppressively, and that she was pain free. She hadn't been pain free for over nine months and the effect of waking up with no pain was enough to jar Kensi into looking at what was reality. It was enough for Kensi to realize that something was not right, that the peace pressing down upon her chest was not natural because there was no logical explanation for why she should be at peace if she was being held captive in Columbia because she had been this close to shutting down most of the nation's illegal weapons trade. It was then that she looked down below her feet to see her body, broken and flung down upon the ground like a thrown away doll's. Her hair was loose and covering her face, her naked skin red and welted, and her clothes torn.

Kensi had realized to her shock that she wasn't breathing and the urge to go towards the light was growing stronger as was the sense of peace but Kensi was panicking and the shock of seeing her broken and mangled body was enough to send Kensi back into her body because it was then that Kensi Blye had realized the then obvious: she had died.

Kensi Blye, in those peaceful, pain free moments, was dead. In every sense of the word.

Kensi did not want to die because that meant leaving the pain and as crazy as it sounded, Kensi wanted the pain because it was all that she had ever known and she didn't want anything else.

She did not want to die, she had realized quickly, as she woke up to the sound of electricity (heart defibulator, her mind later supplied) and the word 'Clear!' yelled in a strong voice that Kensi had come to detest. It felt wrong, Kensi decided as she walked out of the compound that had kept her prisoner for a year with it blowing up behind her because this mission she completed and she could walk out with her own two feet with little harm done upon her body (PTSD didn't count, it wasn't a physical illness). It felt wrong to die.

Even though Kensi has died four times, she barely remembers Death, or she likes to think that she doesn't. She vividly remembers being pulled back across the line from Death to Life. The only thing she can really remember is that every time that she had died it has been practically the same. Out of all of her deaths, Columbia and Cambodia/Laos changed her the most. Those are the places where she has nightmares of and those are the times where if she hears the countries names her right hand, her trigger hand, inexplicably twitches.

Kensi Blye has officially died four times with too many near death experiences to count and the only thing she could remember is that it felt wrong. It felt wrong to die. And even though it felt wrong, Kensi Blye knew that one day Death would eventually claim her. And when that day came, she would fight him tooth and nail because she was Kensi Blye and she was better than to just go calmly into the night.

Why be average and mediocre when you could be the best and unsurpassed in everything, even the number of deaths, because those in her trade accumulated that statistic like others racked up number of husbands or wives. And Kensi, well, Kensi Blye was a master at it.

She would sit till the end of her days reciting Tennyson's _Ulysses, _quite frankly the only piece of poetry she has memorized because she wanted to. She had memorized it for her father's eulogy and to this day it could still bring tears to her eyes because she knew the feeling that Tennyson put behind his words because her father had instilled the same need to wander to look to know. He had had it and he had died because he couldn't control it. Kensi though, Kensi could control it. And she did well, exceedingly well, and it showed in the fact that Kensi was still alive while her father, bless his soul, was six feet under and rotting his in his coffin. Kensi often wondered where the optimistic side of her had been kicked out. She figured Columbia, because she was such a rookie then.

No, she would not go calmly into the night because Kensi Blye was the best and she was unashamed at it. She wasn't ready to die, not quite yet. She would not go calmly into the night because even though she did not like death, though she saw the need for it and she had delivered it many times before, she did not fear death.

Kensi had conquered that particular fear a very long time ago.

* * *

_love, _

_Azaria.  
_


End file.
